C. J. Box, Dark Sky *** 1/2

Evelyn typically includes a well-reviewed popular thriller among the books she gets me for Christmas. Coincidentally, the hero of this year's selection, Joe Pickett, is a game warden just like Mike Bowditch, the hero of last year's selection Dead by Dawn. Joe is in Wyoming, Mike in Maine, but perhaps they'll meet someday at a game warden convention.

In this 21st Joe Pickett adventure, Joe takes a controversial tech billionaire elk hunting. Another set of hunters is out to kill the billionaire, and they end up tracking Joe and their prey through the Bighorn Mountains. Dark Sky is not a mystery: we learn who the bad guys are and what they're planning right up front. It's an survival thriller featuring realistic Western action. The fashionable contemporary villains, I noticed, were out-of-touch liberals (the social media mogul and, in the B story, an antifa activist).

Dark Sky reads like the screenplay for a Netflix or Amazon Prime series. (Actually, the cover says it's on Paramount+ :-) The prose is as straightforward as the characters' motivations and as lean as their inner thoughts. The story has A and B plotlines to keep us engaged with the peripheral characters. People are introduced with a minimum of fuss, and past events are obliquely referred to, all as appropriate for an episode in a later season.

Edward Frenkel, Love & Math ** 1/2

Edward Frenkel is a mathematician who wants to introduce us to the "hidden parallel universe of beauty and elegance" that is mathematics. Sounds great! I am totally on board for this project. Unfortunately, Frenkel fails to engage me despite my receptivity to his message.

The problem is that Frenkel doesn't explain why we should care about the discoveries he presents. He excitedly reports that difficult problems in one area of mathematics, such as number theory, can be solved using methods from another area, such as harmonic analysis. But who cares that the study of automorphic functions can shed light on the counting of solutions of equations modulo primes? I understand the satisfaction that comes from making connections, but without knowing the significance of equations modulo primes or automorphic functions (or Riemann surfaces or braid groups or...) it feels like empty puzzle-solving rather than a view into the mind of God.

Frenkel reserves his most ardent enthusiasm for a research project called the Langlands Program, "considered by many as the Grand Unified Theory of mathematics. It's a fascinating theory that weaves a web of tantalizing connections between mathematical fields that at first glance seem to be light years apart: algebra, geometry, number theory, analysis, and quantum physics." In later chapters he finally attempts to bring the abstractions back down to Earth through connections to physics, but alas the "reality" of the quantum world is just as hard to imagine as multidimensional reduction. I got a better sense of the importance and beauty of symmetry from Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question, even though I won't claim to have understood Wilczek.

Love & Math includes sections of memoir, which I found more engaging because more relatable. Frenkel's reminiscences give a fine sense of the life of an apprentice mathematician and of growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Colleen Hoover, Verity **

Evelyn keeps me in touch with popular literary culture by including books by zeitgeist-y authors among those she buys me for Christmas. Colleen Hoover is a hugely successful, and hugely divisive, author who gained her fame via BookTok, the literary portion of TikTok. She's best known for romance novels targeted at a young adult audience, although Verity is a psychological thriller with romance overtones.

Verity has a solid genre setup. Our heroine Lowen is a writer hired to help finish a best-selling series of books by Verity Crawford, who is unable to finish them due to a suspicious car accident. Lowen travels to Verity's estate in Vermont, where she starts falling for Verity's husband and questioning the official narrative about what happened to Verity and her family. Is Verity really as incapacitated as she appears? Did her two children die in accidents or under more nefarious circumstances? Everything is in place for a moody mystery: the big house in the woods, the suspicious nurse, sleepwalking, the dark basement, the questionable motives.

Unfortunately, Hoover is a bad writer. She seems unable to wring suspense out of the creepiest premises, and her heroine wildly overreacts to everything. The story and characters become increasingly unbelievable, leading to the twist ending that makes no sense at all. I gather that the unusual character names (Lowen, Verity, Chastin, Crew) and the obsession with oral sex are Hoover trademarks.

The title character in Verity is treated as a villain, a psychopath, when she's revealed to have suffered from postpartum depression and jealousy over her husband's attachment to their children. This callous attitude exemplifies Hoover's blunt understanding of psychology, which is probably also the source of the controversy over domestic violence in her earlier books.

Ethan Gallogly, The Trail ***

My second book in a row about walking a long distance trail. The Salt Path was the South West Coast Path in England; The Trail is the John Muir Trail in California. Both books also feature a terminally ill hiker who (spoiler!) goes into remission.

The Trail misleadingly bills itself as a novel. Sure, it's fictional, but its clear intent is to capture the experience of hiking the John Muir Trail rather than to tell an evolving story. There are three pages about picking up their permit, just three paragraphs about waking up to a salivating bear. There's a bibliography and historical timeline at the end, with heaping helpings of Sierra history throughout.

The book consists of chapters named after the twenty-eight days of their hike, with an illustrated map and mileage summary for each one. The book is filled with mostly good advice about backcountry travel, although I question their wisdom in climbing Forester Pass in a storm. Their trip is filled with encounters that are no doubt based in fact but likely occurred over the author's thirty years of backpacking. 

Gallogly forms the book into a quest narrative, with the young narrator and his older, more experienced companion each having emotional issues to work out. Unfortunately, character development is the weakest and least convincing aspect of the story. Gil is a reluctant neophyte, Sal his master, the other hikers embody diverse stereotypical wayfarers. The characters don't develop over time, and their insights are trite and exactly the ones you'd expect from hiking literature.

I take it back. Dialogue is the weakest and least convincing part of the book. Young Gil is prone to questions like "Why was John Muir famous?" and "You said yesterday that Solomons had a barometer for measuring altitude, and I forgot to ask you how it worked." Former professor Syd readily supplies the exposition in well constructed paragraphs. Gil restates the main point in terms of kung fu movies, eventually earning him the trail name Po after the star of Kung Fu Panda.

I found the clunky prose embarrassing in the early going but eventually learned to roll with it.

Raynor Winn, The Salt Path ****

The Salt Path is marketed as the inspirational story of an English couple who "lost everything and embarked on a transformative journey walking the South West Coast Path"; a British Wild. I found it to be something quite different from that. Winn rarely rhapsodizes about life-affirming nature or the healing power of physical endurance. Their impulsive decision to walk the 630-mile path was driven by a desire to postpone thinking about the future, not to bring themselves face-to-face with it. A big part of their motivation seems to be that the trip provides an admirable gloss on their homelessness. They are "wild camping" rather then "rough sleeping."

The South West Coast Path travels along the rugged Cornish coast and through popular tourist destinations. Winn describes the natural beauty but gives more attention to their personal challenges: hiking through pain, finding campsites, the logistics of surviving on an extremely limited budget. I appreciated seeing the vacation spots from their perspective as penniless outsiders.

Almost every decision the Winns make seems understandable but ill-advised. The husband has a degenerative illness that causes constant pain; their sleeping bags are inadequate; they spend their food budget on fudge and ice cream; they're never sure when to expect the next deposit to their accounts. Many readers find their poor judgment exasperating (a representative example), and they are not wrong. For some reason, I enjoyed the un-self-conscious way that Winn describes their adventures. She didn't seem to question whether she was torturing her husband or whether pasties and wine gums were the best dietary options. I could imagine knowing these people.